A growing number of artisan producers, including those behind Fortnum's new
pud with its hidden gold sovereign, are making Christmas puddings to rival
Heston’s 'hidden orange’

Dust down your mixing bowl. Strap on your apron. Stir-up Sunday is nearly here. For us domestic cooks, the first Sunday in Advent and last in November is the moment to gather the impossibly sweet, rich ingredients for a darkly delightful Christmas pudding.

But for the people who make the puds that we buy in the shops, stir-up Sunday – and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday etc – was months ago. Most are made by the Birmingham-based 2 Sisters Food Group, which owns the Matthew Walker brand and produce two-thirds of the puds on sale (including Heston’s famous hidden orange pudding, which fetched hundreds of pounds on eBay after selling out in Waitrose when it launched two years ago), as well as standard puds. One supermarket buyer told me, “We’ve tried using other producers, but no one else gets that dark colour.”

There’s no doubt 2 Sisters do a competent job, although their puddings are hardly home-made. But look a little farther afield and there is a growing band of small artisan producers, the kind who could never produce the volume needed by the supermarkets, but come up instead with confections that border on pudding perfection.

As well as its classic King George pud, the venerable Fortnum & Mason has a new pudding this year – one which is bang on trend. The current mode is for puddings with molten centres – Heston’s Waitrose offering this year has a chocolate middle, Sainsbury’s is cherry and Marks and Spencer has a sugar plum pudding filled with plum sauce. Fortnum’s “Nuts About Christmas” version has a brandy butter filling, a rich, liquid, boozy nirvana that floods the plate, more Sussex pond pudding than chocolate fondant.

But how do you put sauce in a pud, which has to be cooked twice, without the whole lot oozing out or being absorbed by the fruit? On a tiny industrial estate in Kendal, Cumbria, I found the answer – and, on the right, you can see my version, if you’re going to have a home-made pud.

The Ultimate Plum Pudding Company is run by partners (both in life and business) Carole Taylor and Bernice Humphreys. Taylor, a no-nonsense woman with an acerbic Northern sense of humour, shows us into the factory, where a dustbin-sized Fifties Hobart mixer – like a giant KitchenAid – was being readied for the production of the new puddings. “We’re only making 1,000 of Fortnum’s Nuts About Christmas pudding,” she tells me. “It’s going to take eight people three days. We can usually do 1,500 in a day.” The idea of the butter centre was operations manager Nicola Smith’s, Taylor says with a twinkle. “And if she ever has another one like it she’s sacked.”

A heady scent of molasses wafts up as a tub full of dark muscovado sugar hits the Hobart’s beaters, followed by spices (I detect nutmeg and clove), flour and breadcrumbs. “We mix it well now,” explains Smith, who used to work as a chef for Claridge’s and the Savoy, “or the sugar stays in clumps that liquefy when the pudding is cooked.”

Next, the Italian candied peel and Australian candied ginger are tumbled in and stirred up again. “You need everything to get a good coating of flour or they will drop to the bottom, leaving the cake mixture at the top,” Smith says. “They are so syrupy they can just slide through.” Then there is beef suet (vegetarians look away – but it really does make for a better texture) and damsons from the nearby Lyth valley.

The order of addition is important. “Add the liquid too early and you make a heavier pud,” says Smith. But now the free-range eggs can be mixed in, along with finely grated lemon zest, damson purée and Kentish cobnuts. Finally, in goes the dried fruit, already soaked in Somerset cider brandy for 48 hours, and the beaters turn for five minutes, filling the room with a heady boozy smell.

To one side of the room a team of three are carefully arranging the walnut and cobnut topping in the base of china eau-de-nil pudding basins, before spooning in the pudding mix. Now it is time for the key part, the brandy butter filling. The butter has already been scooped and frozen, before being wrapped in a layer of marzipan, a job done by Taylor and Smith. “It was our job every Thursday afternoon for weeks. We got a lot of gossiping done,” laughs Taylor. The trick is to squeeze the marzipan around and finish it to make a perfect seal so that the butter doesn’t leak out.

When the butter and marzipan ball is nestled in to the pudding mixture, the bowl is covered and put with the others ready to be steamed for three and a half hours at 90C. This is a lower temperature than a home cook might expect, but Smith insists: “If a pudding gets too hot the fat seeps out of the mix, which makes for a heavy pudding and claggy feeling in the mouth.”

The puddings are cooled and hand-fed with cider brandy before being topped with the traditional cloth, ready for a final steaming at home. Or microwave? “If you do that, you cook it from the inside out and lose the juiciness of the fruit. And it’s very easy to overcook and wreck it,” Taylor tells me firmly. Nicola, pragmatically, adds, “If you are going to use a microwave, then we recommend doing it on defrost.” I fancy that is one shortcut that isn’t worth taking.